Santo Domingo Festivities as a Subversive Ritual Miskito Perceptions Regarding the Half-Caste in Bluefields and Managua

Abstract

This article examines the way in which a Miskito catholic catechist perceives the Santo Domingo festivities, an event that must be understood as a ritual that emphasizes the humiliation of the Saint, the unease of the sacred symbols and the regeneration. One can see that the horror that the catechist experiments, when he traveled with the anthropologist and he observed this type of ritual; it has little to do with the lack of balanced judgment for the religious practice of others, as it is reflected on his appreciation of the Virgin of Fatima Festival in Bluefields, but a true fear for the symbolic subversion, and the possibility of divine punishment that the ritual represents. This article argues that the explanation of this reaction has to be searched in the history of the Miskito Catholicism, which is very different from the Orthodox Nicaraguan Catholicism, and in the Miskito notions of divinity.